


A Spark Is All I Need

by HawthorneWhisperer



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-07
Packaged: 2018-04-25 09:40:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,504
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4955443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HawthorneWhisperer/pseuds/HawthorneWhisperer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gale had long ago lost count of the partisans who had died in battle with him—remembering them was too painful, so he did his best to forget.  But Madge had crawled inside his chest somehow.</p><p> It was dangerous.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Author's Note

Before anyone reads this one-shot, I’m going to make you read a lecture first.  The Eastern Front of WWII was critical to defeating Hitler and the citizens of the Soviet Union bore an absolutely unimaginable amount of horror that my little one-shot can in no way represent, and as an educator and historian I would be remiss if I didn’t take whatever chance I get to teach people about this lesser-known side of WWII.

As a disclaimer, I should tell you that Soviet/Eastern European history is most definitely not my main area of expertise, but it is something I am qualified to teach in the broadest of strokes.  I also feel that the contributions of the Soviet people during WWII are sorely under recognized in the United States (or at least they were when I was in school, thanks to the Cold War being so recent in memory) and I do my best to rectify that whenever I can.

In the summer of 1941, Hitler broke the Non-Aggression Pact he had made with Stalin before invading Poland in 1939.  Stalin had always known this was coming—communism and fascism are mortal enemies, after all—but didn’t think Hitler would attack the USSR quite so soon.  The Red Army was caught entirely off guard and it was almost a full rout by the Germans, who advanced very quickly through Soviet territories in the summer and early fall.

But here’s the thing about Stalin: he was a horrible person.  And much like Grindelwald, he only missed out on being labeled the 20th century’s greatest monster because Hitler showed up at roughly the same time frothing at the mouth about Jews and the master race.  In the early 1930s, Stalin took a minor crop failure in the Ukraine and turned it into an absolutely horrific famine because he was collectivizing farms around the USSR and overall agricultural output was low.   But rather than lessen the quotas he had set for the First 5 Year Plan, he simply took what grain the Ukraine produced to feed the rest of the Soviet Union and left the Ukraine to starve.  Somewhere between 5-7 million Ukrainians starved to death within just a few years in a man-made famine.  People’s lives meant nothing to Stalin if sacrificing them got him what he wanted.

So when the Germans began advancing through Soviet territories, Stalin and his commanders made a cold-hearted calculation that the USSR had more people than Germany, and thus all the USSR had to do to win was throw more bodies at the Wehrmacht (Nazi army) than the Wehrmacht could throw back.  Desertion and cowardice in the Red Army were capital offenses, which was not uncommon for militaries at this time.  But then Stalin issued Order 227, stating that “the only extenuating cause is death.”  Which meant you fight to the death or you will be executed by your commanders.  Deserters and cowards could be executed without a tribunal, and—in a new and particularly horrid addition to military law—a deserter’s family could be punished or executed as well.

Within three months of the German attack, 45 million former Soviet citizens were under German control.  For every German killed, 20 Soviet soldiers lost their lives.  Eventually, the German advance ground to a halt the winter of 1941-42, mostly because the Germans (like Napoleon before them) were completely unprepared for a Russian winter.  However, those 45 million people—largely Eastern European and of Slavic descent—remained under German control until 1944-45 when the Red Army finally managed to push the Germans back.

It’s those people who suffered the worst of Hitler’s wrath.  Slavic people were fairly low on Hitler’s totem pole of races; they weren’t as low as Jewish people, but they still were labeled “undesirable.”  If they were not executed outright or shipped to extermination camps, they were forced into slave labor.  Additionally, a majority of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust were of Slavic and Eastern European origin.

Pockets of resistance to the Nazis did exist, and the partisans (the subject of this story) were small guerrilla bands that fought for the Soviet Union in German-occupied territories.  Not all were in favor of the Soviet Union, although some were staunch communists.  There was a measure coordination with the Red Army—some partisan units were specifically organized by the USSR, while others were indigenous resistance organizations that accepted Soviet help.  However, there was tension between nationalist resistance groups and Soviet allied groups, and the relationship was not always easy (and sometimes devolved into violence).

In 1944 the tide turned, and the Red Army began marching back through Eastern Europe and into Germany in 1945.  Most concentration camps were liberated by the Red Army, as they were primarily located in Eastern European areas.  The Red Army adopted a policy of retribution, which meant that war crimes (mostly raping and/or killing civilians for the crime of being German or not fighting the Germans hard enough) were outright encouraged by commanders.  The Red Army’s sack of Berlin was absolutely horrific, as soldiers who had spent four years facing unimaginable terror were told to exact their revenge on the German people however they saw fit.  While other Allied troops did not participate on a large scale in this brutality, the Allied forces had decided that total surrender was the only option for Germany—WWI’s Armistice had left some Germans with the impression they were winning the First World War and then were unfairly sold out during the peace treaty. Hitler had exploited this belief, attributing the Armistice and Versailles Treaty to a secret cabal of Jewish socialists intent on destroying Germany, and rode that wave of resentment into the chancellorship of Germany.  The Allies felt that the complete and utter destruction of Berlin was necessary to avoid a repeat of the deeply unpopular Versailles Treaty, and thus the US and Britain looked the other way while the Red Army did as they pleased.  (There are also reports that members of the Red Army who refused to take part in the brutality were threatened with execution—and the execution of their families—so some of the atrocities were committed under duress, although that was surely of no comfort to the civilians enduring their occupation.)  Despite its reputation in the United States, World War II was far from a “good” war.

All told, the USSR lost between 20-30 million people to World War II.  Ten million were soldiers, but the rest of the dead were civilians.  (For comparison, the US lost a little over 400,000 soldiers and less than 2,000 civilians).  This does not count the civilians that were executed by the Red Army following their liberation from Germany.  Some were executed for “collaboration” (which in many cases amounted to “still being alive after several years of German occupation, so by default you were a collaborator”) and others for insufficiently supporting communism—nationalist resistance groups were generally singled out for this crime.  The USSR also executed most returned prisoners of war for violating the “fight to the death” decree.  The psychological scars of German occupation followed by Red Army reprisals ran deep in the Soviet Union for decades after the official conclusion of hostilities.

All of this is to demonstrate the absolute hell that Soviet citizens went through, at the hands of both Hitler and Stalin.  However, it was Hitler’s preoccupation with the USSR that allowed the rest of the Allied forces regroup and eventually open a second front  with D-Day.  (Stalin begged the rest of the Allied forces to open a second front much earlier, but Roosevelt and Churchill were more than content to let the USSR bear the worst of it for several years until they were ready).  World War II would have ended very, very differently if it wasn’t for the people of the Soviet Union.

The story that follows is a heavily sanitized version (everybody lives!) of the partisans’ plight and in no way should be seen as representative.  This story was inspired by [jeeno2](http://tmblr.co/m7wg6dG47exka92INtOHLcQ)’s family history, as some of her relatives were partisans during World War II.  If you’re interested in further reading on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, I suggest  _Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939-1945_  by Catherine Merridale and  _Bloodlands_ :  _Europe between Hitler and Stalin_  by Timothy Snyder. 

 


	2. A Spark Is All I Need

Gale surveyed the new batch of recruits Thom had brought back to the camp.  A handful of older, grizzled men and young men with angry, bitter eyes—the usual—and one young woman about his age.  Gale almost rolled his eyes when he saw her.  She was soft and pretty and looked as though she hadn’t missed a meal or worked a day in her life.  The only sign that it was wartime were the dark blue circles under her eyes, hinting at sleepless nights. Gale scowled at her—he had enough things to worry about without some rich girl thinking she could play at war.  Or worse, be a spy.  She looked like she’d fallen out of one of Hitler’s posters, after all.  What did she care?

He strode over and glowered at her.  “Why?” he barked.  If she couldn’t answer, he’d take her straight back to the road.  No way was he taking someone to their camp that they couldn’t trust.  Gale couldn’t imagine what Thom had been thinking, bring her here.

The blonde stood up straight and glared at him.  “There’s nothing left for me.  So let me fight.”  Her blue eyes had that vacant, lost look he knew all too well.  It hurt to see, even though he should have been used to it by now.  Nearly everyone in his camp looked like that these days—three solid years of fighting had ground everyone who remained into mere echoes of who they had been.  A strange desire to protect her, to keep her from becoming whatever he and his crew had become, tore through him but he pushed it aside.  He gave her a curt nod and jerked his head back toward camp.  They fell in behind him, Thom bringing up the rear.

 

She was a terrible shot.  Well, not terrible, but aside from her first shot when she hit a tree dead center, at best she was barely winging the targets.  She was better with knives though, and that plus her Aryan good looks would make her excellent bait for the Germans.  Her name was Madge—which she had informed him after getting the drop on him during hand-to-hand training.  He should have easily beaten her, seeing as he was nearly a foot taller than her and his previous assumptions about her past seemed to be true.  But she was fierce and smart, and he kept finding himself holding back.

He didn’t want to hurt her.

 It was ridiculous.  Gale had long ago lost count of the partisans who had died in battle with him—remembering them was too painful, so he did his best to forget.  But Madge had crawled inside his chest somehow.

 It was dangerous.

During their first raid with the new recruits Madge played her part perfectly.  She ran headfirst into an entire troop of Germans, screaming for help.  Just as they hoped, the Nazis followed her back into the woods, anticipating a handful of drunk ruffians intent on raping a pretty girl.

Instead they found a dozen heavily armed men, courtesy of the Red Army.  One man almost got away, but Madge stepped out from behind a tree and deftly slit his throat before he ever realized she was there.

This war was a bloody business.  Gale had gotten used to it, but he could see in her face that she had never killed before.  He told himself she’d toughen up, but that night he rolled over to see her sitting by the fire, tears streaming down her face.  He meant to turn away, but found himself walking over to her.  Madge hastily wiped at the tears on her face, but Gale tipped his head toward the opening of the cave.  She nodded and followed him out into the chill night air.

Gale led her several paces from the cave before sitting down on a fallen log.  She sank next to him, still trying to hide her sniffles.  “Does it ever get easier?” she whispered.

“Yeah,” he responded hoarsely.  “It does.”  And that was the worst part, really—the fact that he no longer even registered the faces of the men he killed.  Not consciously, anyway.  Gale dreamed of them most nights, but in the morning their faces faded into nothingness. 

He didn’t want that to happen to Madge.

“It’s just…they thought they were helping me.”  Her voice was tiny.

Gale hadn’t even considered that angle, and a wave of shame went through him.  When they planned to use Madge as bait, he’d never thought about the fact that she would be playing on men’s better instincts.  He’d long ago stopped thinking of the Germans as men, but he supposed deep down, they were.  “We could always find you something else to do here,” he offered.  He wasn’t sure what he was saying—they needed every able bodied fighter they could get.  And Madge had been invaluable today, so putting her out of commission would be irresponsible.

Madge made a derisive sound.  “What, like inventory our supplies?  Food: not enough.  Guns and ammo: barely enough.  There.  We’re done.”  She had a point, he had to admit. 

“Well, you can always come talk to me if you need to.”  Again, he didn’t know why he was offering— _talking_  had never been Gale Hawthorne’s strong suit.

Madge nodded slowly.  “How long have you been doing this?”

“Fighting for the Reds?  Two years.  But Thom and I were out here for almost a year before that.”  They hadn’t done much aside from try to survive for those first few months.  Sure, they’d pulled a few raids for supplies, picked off a few drunk Germans wandering alone at night.  But two men with a handful of guns between them could hardly do much damage.  So when Boggs had contacted them with an offer of support from the Red Army, they had jumped at the chance.  Gale felt little allegiance to communism or the Soviet Union—not after he watched his family almost starve to death ten years before so Stalin could meet his grain quotas–but if they were willing to help him kill Nazis he wasn’t going to complain.  More than once he wondered if he was doing the right thing, but at this point it was fight or die.

Gale chose to fight.

“Why did you come to us?” he asked.

Madge sat silently for a long moment.  “I didn’t have anyone left.  My father was the mayor when the Germans came, and he thought that if he worked with them he could protect people.  He did his best, but when he tried to stop a deportation…”  she trailed off, and Gale could fill in the blanks.  He’d seen enough mass graves to know what happened to those who defied Nazi orders.

“And your mother?”

“She died a long time ago.”  Madge said dully.  “You’re Jewish, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”  Not that Gale had done anything like pray for years, even before the war.  Gale had been planning to join the rest of his family in the United States when the Germans invaded and put an end to that.  He and Thom had fled their village as soon as they learned of the German advance—they tried to convince their neighbors to join them, but too many were unwilling to risk the forests.  They were probably all dead now.

Gale still felt guilty.

Madge didn’t say anything in response, just leaned her head against his shoulder.  Gale couldn’t remember the last time someone had touched him like that—sometimes Thom would thump his back after a successful raid, but it had been years since someone had reached out to him for comfort. 

It felt good. 

So good, in fact, that he rested his cheek on the top of her head until he felt her body grow heavy against his.  He roused Madge and they walked back to the cave, her tears long gone.

 

After that night, Gale found himself structuring raids so Madge would be in less danger.  She never asked, and if she suspected he was arranging things to keep her out of the line of fire, she never mentioned it.  They didn’t interact much more than anyone else in the camp.

Not until the day he took a bullet for her.

Well, not directly.  It only grazed his shoulder as he threw himself in front of her and pulled her to the ground, shielding her with his body.   But he was still injured, a fact that Haymitch harped on endlessly.  “You shouldn’t have done that, boy,” he scolded, taking a pull on his vodka before pouring a bit over Gale’s wound.  Gale hissed at the burn, but Haymitch ignored him.  “We need you more than we need anyone else.  You taking foolish risks for a pretty girl isn’t going to help anyone.”

Gale resented the implication that he’d only done it because Madge was pretty.  He did it because she was vital–Madge spoke German and Russian as well as passable Polish, all in addition to their native Ukrainian.  No one else had anywhere near that many languages, nor was anyone else nearly as fluent.  She was charming, too.  None of the rest of them had her ease with strangers, or the ability to convince people that they were worth the risk.  Madge was critical, and the fact that Haymitch thought he was foolish for protecting her was shortsighted.  They needed her.

Gale needed her too, although he wasn’t quite ready to admit that.

When his wound was patched he set off to find her and make sure she was okay.  Madge had helped him back to camp, but disappeared as soon as Haymitch approached with his bandages and vodka.  Gale found her pacing near the stream.  He smiled hopefully, but her face contorted into fury as she stormed toward him. 

“Don’t you  _ever_  do that again,” she growled, shoving his chest as hard as she could.

Gale had not anticipated this reaction.  Fear, maybe, or relief that he was all right, perhaps.  But anger?  His own temper flared.  “Don’t do what?   _Save your life?”_

Madge narrowed her eyes at him.  “Exactly.  Don’t you dare put yourself in danger for me.  You matter.”

“And you don’t?”  He still couldn’t figure out where her rage was coming from, he just knew it hit him with all the force of a bomb, tearing at his heart like shrapnel.

“No.  I don’t.  But you do.  And if you—just don’t.  Don’t do that again.”  And with that she took one step closer to him and kissed him.  The kiss was harsh and soft at the same time, and Gale could taste the salt of her tears.  But before he could understand exactly what was happening she pulled back and stalked away, once again disappearing into the forest.

Madge avoided him after that, getting up and moving if he sat down near her at the fire, pointedly moving her bedroll as far from his little alcove in the cave as she could get.  Gale decided to let her have her space and only assigned her to missions he wasn’t on.

He spent every second she was on those missions worrying that he’d just sent her to her death.

Three weeks later, they received word of a major shipment on German supply lines.  The raid they orchestrated was big and complicated, and required everyone in the camp.  Madge and Bristel were in charge of laying the explosives on the rail lines—the Germans would pay far less attention to two peasant women in long skirts and kerchiefs out gathering firewood than anyone else.  They were supposed to head straight back to camp, but once the explosives went off everything went to hell.

There were more soldiers on the train than the Red Army had predicted, and the derailment didn’t take them out of commission the way Gale had hoped.  The firefight was fierce and things looked bleak until Madge and Bristel reappeared with armfuls of their precious grenades.  The explosions distracted the Germans enough for Gale and the rest of his men to escape.

He ran blindly after Madge into the woods.  The only important thing right now was getting as far from the train as possible without going back to camp.  On the off chance the Nazis sent out a patrol, twelve people running through the forest to the same destination would leave a trail even the dumbest German could follow.

Madge started slowing down around the same time Gale was running out of breath.  She collapsed against a tree, breathing hard.  They were alone—everyone else had chosen different routes.  Gale cracked a tiny smile that she returned, and then suddenly her lips were on his once again.

Just like their first kiss, it was needy and rough at the same time.  Gale knew what was happening—there was a reason Thom and Bristel disappeared together after every raid—but he couldn’t stop himself.  He needed her; he needed to feel alive after being so close to death.

And she needed it too.

Madge’s hands fumbled with his belt while his tongue brushed against hers and his fingers gathered her skirts in his fists.  He wished he could take his time with her, undress her slowly and kiss her softly, but those were luxuries from a world that no longer existed.  All that mattered now was connection and raw sensation, so he shoved her underwear down and she stepped out of it.

Gale lifted her into his arms and pressed her back against the tree.  The bark must have been biting into her skin, but she paid it no mind as she sucked hard kisses down his neck.  He pushed into her right away, not wanting to wait.  Madge gasped but urged him on, her own need swallowing his own.

Their coupling was quick but fierce—Madge’s walls fluttered just before he pulled out and spilled himself on the forest floor.  Her face was flushed but unembarrassed as she pulled her underwear back on and took his hand, leading him back to camp.

After that, Gale stopped putting Madge in different raiding parties.  And after every successful attack they found their way to one another, harsh and desperate.  Sometimes they fucked standing up against a tree like the first time, but other times she laid on her back on the damp leaves.  Still other times she dropped to her knees in front of him, taking him in her mouth until he shattered and then he did the same, losing himself in her taste.  Madge was oblivion and comfort all at once.

Gale would have given anything to have met her someplace that wasn’t hell on earth.

The nights got longer and colder, and Gale awoke one night to find Madge curled up against him, her own blanket over them.  They shared a bedroll every night after that.  Once, he woke to Madge crying, and his attempts at kissing away her tears led to her on top, sinking down on him with a sharp hiss.  Another night Gale couldn’t sleep, so Madge murmured a sweet story about a life they might have somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t destroyed by war.

Gale learned the shape of her through her clothes, and how to bring her to the edge with a twist of his hips.  She discovered the way he moaned when she scraped her teeth against his skin.  They never discussed what happened after raids or in the black moments of the night.  But whatever one needed, the other gave without question.

If he thought there was a chance they would both survive, Gale would have let himself love her.

The winter was long and harsh, but the news that the Germans were finally retreating buoyed everyone’s spirits.  A scratchy radio transmission ordered them to hold position until the Germans were through, then harry them from behind.  Gale was instructed to wait until the Red Army arrived, as command had special plans for him.

Madge stayed behind as well, an unspoken hope floating between them.  Gale and Thom shared one last back-thumping hug, and Haymitch gave him a handshake and a gravelly goodbye.  They were his longest standing companions, and watching them troop off to chase the Germans to the Polish border gave him an odd sense of loneliness.  Madge slipped her hand in his and squeezed, once again bringing him back with only her presence.

There was an abandoned house a few miles away, near the major road and railway the Red Army would use for their advance.  Gale and his crew had used it before as a lookout, but it had been deemed too close to the Germans to occupy for longer than a few hours at a time.  But with the Germans on the run, it would situate them perfectly for the arrival of the Soviets.  Gale and Madge walked there quietly, neither of them daring to hope that that the war might be over for them.

Gale shouldered the door open.  It was a small house, but out of the way enough that it had been largely unmolested.  Gale never let himself wonder about the family that had lived there—more than likely they were long dead, and pondering how and when that happened wouldn’t bring them back.

Madge wandered through the house in the late winter twilight.  She let out a short cheer when she reached a back room.  “Gale, there’s a  _bed_.  A real bed, Gale.”   He grinned and followed her back there, where she was sprawled on her stomach.  “Gale, it’s so  _soft_ ,” she moaned, her face muffled by the mattress, their bedrolls abandoned on the floor.  He sat down next to her and untied his boots before flopping back next to her.

Madge curled on her side and smiled at him, almost shyly.  Gale smiled back and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear.  He tipped his head and kissed her softly, slowly.  For once there was no mad desperation; they had walls around them and a bed beneath them.  There were no other partisans nearby, no one to stay quiet for. 

Gale planned to take his time. 

He deepened the kiss and crawled over her, feeling her sink into the mattress under his weight.  He trailed his lips down the side of her neck and sucked a red mark just above her collarbone.  She tugged off his sweater and busied herself with unbuttoning his shirt as his own hands slid underneath her sweater, revealing a soft slice of her stomach.

Madge pushed his shirt off and mock-groaned in frustration when she realized he still had an undershirt on as well.  “So many layers,” she muttered against his lips.  Gale grinned and helped her remove the offending garment, and then pulled her own sweater and two shirts off as well.  They got stuck around her ears and she giggled.  Gale hadn’t heard her laugh much in the last seven months.

It was a beautiful sound.

She unhooked her brassiere and looked up at him through her eyelashes.  Gale pressed her back down, enjoying the soft feeling of her breasts against his chest.  He brushed some golden hair out of her eyes and smiled.  His heart was pounding—he knew her intimately, but somehow this was different.  She undid his trousers and pushed them down.  Gale kicked them off and bent to her chest, kissing from her collarbone to one pink nipple that pebbled under his touch.  He took it in his mouth and teased it with his tongue, enjoying the moans that it pulled from her throat.  Gale had felt her breasts countless times, and kissed them in the dark of the cave, her shirt and sweater pushed up near her neck.  But he had never been able to see them, touch them, kiss them like this.  Gale could have spent hours there, but Madge tangled her fingers in his hair and pulled him up for a kiss.  His fingers drifted down the smooth curve of her belly to unbutton her trousers.  She shimmied out of them and her underwear as well, a soft blush spreading across her chest.

They’d never been completely naked together before, he realized.  To even the score he stood and pulled his own boxers down before covering her body with his once more.  The feel of her skin against his could drive him insane—soft and warm, just like her.  He couldn’t kiss her deep enough, long enough.  He started kissing his way down her body, stopping to lave her nipple with his tongue once more.  Madge arched into his touch and he grinned, snaking a hand down to her hip. 

Gale kept moving down, over her ribs and stomach. He’d tasted her before, but never with the promise of an entire evening stretching out before them.  He pushed her thighs out and spread her folds with his fingers, tracing his tongue  from her entrance to the apex.  He swirled his tongue and reveled in the knowledge that when she could be, Madge was  _loud_.  Gale teased her until he felt her fingernails scrape at his scalp, and then he acquiesced to her wishes and focused all his attention on the bud that made her scream loud enough to alert anyone in a three mile radius.

She was still coming when he pushed into her, the last pulses of her orgasm drawing him in.  Madge keened again and dug her nails into his backside, driving him in deeper.  Gale’s skin was on fire but nothing compared to the heat of her, to the way it felt to move inside her with no reason to hold back.  The blush across her chest deepened as he sped up his strokes.  Gale whispered a warning—her heels were digging into his lower back, keeping him in place—but her eyes were burning into him.  “Please,” she begged.

Gale couldn’t deny her anything.

His release came hard and fast and he emptied himself into her, body and soul.  Gale collapsed next to her on the bed as she kissed him again, twining her arms around his neck.  The light had completed faded and he could just barely make out the blue of her eyes, a thin ring around the blackness of her pupils.  She rested her head on his chest, right where his heart was still pounding.  Gale tangled his fingers in her hair, wondering how it could possibly be so soft.

Eventually, Gale rolled out of the bed and dug out a few candles from a cupboard.  He set them on the ground and windowsill of the bedroom and burrowed back under the blankets as quickly as he could.  Madge kissed him and within moments their desire overtook them again.  It ended with Madge riding him, her hips rolling sinuously and her skin glowing in the candlelight.  They slept in the bed together that night, curled around each other and sleeping soundly for the first time in years.

The distant rumbling of tanks woke them—the Red Army had arrived.  They dressed and walked back into the woods.  They took the long way, as neither of them was quite ready to let anyone else intrude on their time together, and circled back toward the village.  Several sharp popping sounds froze them in their tracks.

Gale and Madge ducked down in the underbrush, peering in the direction of the shots.  After years of constant war, Gale shouldn’t have been surprised by what he saw, but he was.

The Soviets were executing civilians.

He recognized a few of the dead—people whose only crime was trying to stay alive.  Some of them had helped the partisans, but apparently not vocally enough.  His stomach churned at the thought.  Madge covered her mouth to keep from crying out.

They backed away slowly, silently, until they were a safe distance away.  Madge turned to him, tears streaming down her face.  “Is that—that’s who we were fighting for?”

Gale pulled her close, burying his face in her hair.  “No.  That—that’s not us.”  The truth was, he never really thought of himself as fighting  _for_  anything—he was fighting against the Germans and that was it.

“Now what?” she asked against his chest.

Gale thought for a minute.  Rejoining the Reds now seemed like a risky prospect.  “We leave.”

“To where?”

“The Americans and the British would want to meet the Red Army in Berlin.  If we find them, we could always try and get to America.” Gale realized he had never truly asked Madge if she wanted to join his family in America, but she didn’t protest.  She was the closest thing he had to family aside from Thom anyway.

He wondered when that happened.

Madge and Gale set off to the west, heading out of the Ukraine and into Poland, following both the retreating German forces and the Red Army.  Everywhere they went they saw nothing but destruction.  The hungry eyes and distended bellies of the few children they saw wrenched at his heart, remembering his own family’s battle against starvation a decade before.  He lost his father in that battle and didn’t want to lose Madge in this one, so they stayed off the main roads all through Poland, navigating with sketchy maps and occasionally by the stars. 

When they crossed the border into Germany, Gale hotwired an abandoned truck.

Gale had been thinking of Germany as nothing but the enemy for years, but once across the border he couldn’t see much difference.  The children were still starving and their eyes were dull, the farms and homes were destroyed just like every village they’d walked through. 

It should have felt like justice, but it didn’t.

Gale and Madge weren’t the only people on the move—every day, more and more civilians joined the exodus.  Berlin barely resembled a city.  It looked more like ancient ruins, but the inhabitants were still there, their eyes bearing witness to the horrors they had seen.  Gale loaded the pickup with anyone who needed a ride as they entered the city.

It took awhile, but eventually they found the American base.  Gale tried to speak to the guards, but they didn’t understand his heavily accented Russian any better than Ukrainian.  He didn’t think Yiddish would be much help either and the redhaired guard was clearly getting frustrated.  Suddenly, Madge leaned across the bench seat and began speaking.  Gale didn’t understand her, but the guard did.  Apparently, Madge spoke English too—something she’d never mentioned before, but was a welcome surprise. 

The guard motioned for everyone to exit the truck.  With Madge as translator, they walked several blocks to a makeshift camp.  “What did you say to him?” he asked.

“I told him our village was destroyed and we have nowhere to go, so we’ll be labeled displaced persons.  We’ll have to live in this camp, but eventually we’ll be relocated.  Also…” she took a deep breath.  “I told him we were married.  I thought we might get split up otherwise.  I hope…hope that’s okay.”

Gale took her hand in his.  “It’s fine.”  What he didn’t say was that it felt true, even though he’d never thought about it before, never let himself consider a future where they both survived.  That night, they curled up on a tiny cot in a makeshift camp in the ruins of an old building, trying to forget that they were now seeking shelter in the heart of their enemy, hoping that people who had left them to die for years would take pity on them and give them a home.

For the next six months, Gale and Madge called that tent home, even though it was little more than a piece of canvas propped up by sticks and string.  As the weather grew colder and still the Americans equivocated about when they would leave, Gale worried that they would end up spending the winter in the tent city.  It was hardly any less luxurious than the cave, but the cave provided shelter from the wind and the fellow partisans provided decent company.  This time, they only had each other, and at night the wind knifed through meager their canvas shelter.

Just as Gale had given up hope that they would be relocated before the snow fell, a blond American with a smile too big to be believed showed up at their tent.  In halting Ukrainian—mixed with English that Madge translated for Gale—he explained that Gale’s family had been located and they had been approved to move to the United States.  The American smiled even more broadly as he explained that _his_  fiancé is Ukrainian and knew Gale’s family in America, a fact that Madge found charming and Gale found entirely irrelevant.  But at least they were leaving, and might even be living in a real house before the year was out.

But first they had to face a new torture in the form of an ocean crossing.  Gale didn’t know he got seasick until they were a day out of Germany, and he spent the rest of the journey moaning and retching in their tiny cabin while Madge wiped his forehead with damp rags.  At one point he told her he understood if she wanted to find someone better in America, someone who was whole and healthy—he wouldn’t make her honor their imaginary marriage.  Madge just clucked her tongue and told him not to be ridiculous.

Gale felt shaky as the ship finally docked with a muffled thump.  He was suddenly apprehensive—after years of hell, could they really be safe?  He knew his family would be waiting, but he’d spent so long operating under a cloud of fear and suspicion that he couldn’t bring himself to trust that it really would be different here.  Madge held out her hand to him and again he wondered if she really wanted to be saddled with a Ukrainian Jew who couldn’t speak the language and whose only real skill was killing. He had to throw an arm over Madge’s shoulders for support while she carried their small bag of possessions and helped him up the stairs to the deck.  At the top of the gangplank he stopped and surveyed the crowd, spotting a crowd of dark brown heads that were unmistakably his family, waving excitedly.  Madge looked up at him with a small smile and rose on her toes, pressing a kiss to his jaw.  “Ready?” she asked quietly, and at his nod they slowly made their way down, towards his family and away from the past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, this is inspired by real life but should not be taken as an accurate portrayal of the partisans’ struggles. And no, they don’t use a condom because while condoms existed in the 1940s the chances of a ragtag band of rebels having reliable access to them are slim to none. The pullout method is not a reliable form a birth control, so kids, if you’re thinking of having unprotected sex, ask yourself: am I a freedom fighter living in the woods of Eastern Europe during the 1940s? No? Then go buy yourself some damn condoms.


End file.
